232 RüdigerKunow
(especially in institutional contexts), focusing on the collection and
interpretation of mass data on and providing systemic analysis of the
social positioning of an identifiable cohort of the adult population of
modern nation states, those defined as "aging" or "old." Questions
regardingtheaccessofseniorcitizensto theinstitutionsofasociety,of
theallocationofresources,especiallyinthefieldsofsocialsecurityand
medicine,theimpactofsocio-economicdifferentialsonthelivesofaged
cohort––all these issues have loomed large in the field of social
gerontology (and in politics in the United NationsAgeing SocialPolicy
and Development Division). As a result, the overall quality of life for
manyelderlypeopleintheUnitedStatesandothernationsoftheGlobal
North has clearly improved during the decades since World War II.
Especially beginning in the 1960s, social gerontologists have also been
active outside the academy helping to formulate social policy agendas
directed at specific needs of the growing population of seniors.The
BerlinAgeStudy(1999)andthe2002ValenciaForumaremilestonesin
this line of work which in the U.S. is coordinated by the National
InstituteofAgeing(NIA).
In this institutionaland political framework, gerontology hasalways
been more than the study of older people. It has been instrumental for
thesweepingdiscipliningofoldage^73 sincethe19thcentury,disciplining
here understood in the Foucauldian sense, as a procedure that involves
both, the formation of (new) scientific disciplines centered on age and
the incorporation/subjection of the aged in/to the power-knowledge
formationsthuscreated.^74 Theseformations,heresummarizedunderthe
(^73) Theconceptofdisciplining hasbeen broughtto gerontology and also cultural
analysis by Stephen Katz, among others. Relying on Foucauldian theory, Katz
sees the "disciplining of old age" (Disciplining Old Age 1) as a double
appropriation of human life: "disciplines do not just construct dominant
representations of the world but also determine the ways in which the people
who inhabit it can be known, studied, calculated, helped, punished, and
liberated"(Di scipliningOldAge2).
(^74) Foucault saw this disciplining as part of the growing power over life. This
development since the 17thcentury was, in his view, two-tiered: "One of these
poles—the first to be formed, it seems—centered on the body as a machine: its
disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the
parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of